Meanwhile, all I see are closed businesses being replaced by second-hand stores, flea markets and yard sales. I know the country is for sale to the highest bidder. But if something isn't done about the lost jobs that are NEVER coming back, us "little people" will turn America into a third-world bazaar in order to just survive.

I think you mean the cheapest labor and poorest environmental conditions.

When I see your "ideas" imported from aboard and you without a job or making $8 per hour with no benefits, maybe you'll get the message.

PWI is worth the money, for sure, but that's a long scroll down for something that is outdated?

Since we have a trade deficit with most of the world a reduction in our trade would be a net advantage to Americans. An advantage approximating the stimulus package each and ever year without borrowing. The problem with a trade war is the adverse effects of the transition as exporters are harmed faster than domestic production can replace imports. The current recession provides a cushion to that transition. The unemployed provide an instant labor pool for domestic production to replace outsourced production. The rest of the world is already not buying out stuff unless there is no other source. That means that in a tariff driven trade war imports would decline much more than exports. The dire consequences laid out here are unlikely due to the trade deficit. Tariffs would damage the global economy but that would be a good thing for the American people.

Mr. Hutchinson exaggerates the 1929-32 trade decline. True the decline was 66 percent but that is misleading. The decline was from 6 percent of GDP to 2 percent. Much to small to justify the claims made here. Moreover the tariffs of the 1930s were not new. At the time Smoot-Hawley was introduced, tariffs were already at 40 percent and the United States had been the world’s most tariff protected nation for over a hundred years. Prosperous years during which all the bad things free traders claim will happen to a trade protected economy never happened. It is unreasonable to blame the Great Depression of something that had been going on for more that a hundred very prosperous years.

Dumping matters because it cost Americans jobs. Applying David Ricardo’s theory of “Comparative Advantage” is a misreading of the theory. Our free trade agreements are inconsistent with both Ricardo’s theory and Adam Smith’s older theory of “Absolute Advantage.” Under both theories land, labor, and capital are factors of production which the state is obliged to protect. United States free trade agreements protect capital but with some small exceptions labor is thrown to the wolves by both political parties. With both Smith and Ricardo trade was about products. Current trade deals are about cheap labor. Also both were Christians and intended their theories to be practiced within the framework of Christian morality by which they meant a fair return for land, labor, and capital. Not capital alone. Under our present trade agreements wages fall faster than prices. That is reflected in American Average Weekly Earnings which peaked in 1973 and are down since. The claim that consumers benefit while workers are hurt ignores the fact that for all practical purposes workers and consumers are the same people.

A decline in global trade would help Americans but it would hurt a lot of corporations. American tire makers did not join complaint because, having already fired American, it is their plants in China that are making the tires.

The promise of free trade has proven to be as fraudulent as a Bernie Madoff account statement. It is time we end this scam on the American people and develop trade agreements consistent with the theories of Smith and Ricardo.